


The Severing Sound

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory, Blood, Child Neglect, Dead animals, Deceased parent, Gen, Hunting, I did the best I could with the materials I had, Nekrotafeyan ecology, OK they’re like 14-15 outside of the flashbacks, Scenery Porn, Sibling Relationship, Troy being a squish, Tyreen PoV, Tyreen being Tyreen, Underage Drinking, all baby Calypso content, as canon compliant as I could make it, brief medical content, brief non-human gore, creepy other things, creepy ruins, dressing and eating of said dead animals, mild imagined body horror, rather a lot of drool
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26529154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: Tyreen discovers a map Leda left behind.  The treasure hunt is on, but the twins don’t exactly stop to wonder what they’ll be searching for before they leave.  Or if Leda had reasons she didn’t tell them about every place she visited on Nekrotafeyo...Contains no incestuous matter, though if you’ve read any of my other Borderlands stories, some content could be taken down that road.Having a bit of an experiment with this writing vignettes to downtempo music and stringing them together.  Still got some wiggle room if anybody wants to make a pertinent request or send over a couple of tracks.  Updates currently somewhat erratic.11/26/2020: Uploaded revised versions of a few chapters.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Grimeverse





	1. Chapter 1

Tyreen finds the map caught in the seam of a common room drawer. Years of being overlooked have bent it into a corner where only a rustle gives it away. Paper’s so rare in her life that she assumes it’s a piece of dried air algae at first touch. She can use those to patch her underpants, so of course she digs it out, only to realize she’s mistaken the instant before she lays eyes on the neat creases, the fact it’s almost white where in her world only fungus and sclera and clouds are white. 

She reaches out with her inborn sense of where other life exists. Troy’s no place close by. Dad hums two rooms down. She has at least thirty heartbeats before anyone comes looking for her. It’s more than enough to take a peek.

Tyreen unfastens the paper by pressing into the folds the way she would the petals of a lucerna holding moth-pollen she wants. The crinkling sound has her hair standing on end. But no one else is listening. She knows. She slides her thumbs in, holding tight enough to make her own faint creases.

It’s a map, drawn with one of the colored pens that ran out not long after she and her brother were born. Nothing this shade of pinkish red lives on Nekrotafeyo. She blinks before her eyes focus on the lines. 

Tryeen recognizes the ridges where she and her brother live. Then those are the “nice” ruins, the “not nice” ruins and the ones they don’t visit anymore for their own reasons; the Southerly plains and hills and lakes growing in old crater holes. 

Then map moves North, towards the singing towers and the ravine where the streams go to die. It shows a gasp in that gash across the continent and a dotted line for a path. Tyreen knows those from old pirate stories, her favorite bedtime snack. The line winds, encounters a boundary past which the map has been heavily drawn on, showing a texture like bulkhead plating. There’s a mark for a camp, music notes, and a caption: “Severing Sound”. 

That Eastern part of the map ends after this place where her blank right thumb flexes.

West in the faint glow of her left, there’s a pit of smashed pylons and more words. “Threw up AGAIN & decided to turn back.”

Tyreen grins. 

This is her mother’s handwriting. She has very little of that woman’s things, no paper and certainly no maps. This one she folds back up and tucks over the side of her underpants, so that changes.

“Starlight, did you find me a lamp that works?” Dad calls. 

As if she could miss them. She’s staring down a drawer full. “Yeah. Just a sec.” Tyreen grabs one of the mining lanterns they’ve somehow kept running for fifteen years and leaves with it.

At the doorway, she pauses for half of her twenty-ninth heartbeat to wipe the pleasure from her face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 10/8/2020: Standardized some terminology.   
> Started a spreadsheet, in fact: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XXuR_VFO0ooBuUOFOA-3JWLMlqlmXjROcq37WtLR8gA/edit?usp=sharing


	2. Chapter 2

Sometime after night falls, Dad heads to his room and locks the door. His welding torch fizzes. Sparrow asks him if he wants a drink. 

Tyreen doesn’t hear the answer. She used to knock and say one last little thing when he left suddenly like this. It’s been a few years since she tried. It’s been a few more years since Dad said anything back. Tonight, she’s got other plans anyway.

She darts across the center of the chamber to her brother’s room and swings inside. The only sound is the rustle of the slip she wears to bed. She knows how to slide the door without it hissing.

Troy looks up from whatever he’s reading. 

His room is a comfortable mess. A crate desk and pieced together shelves overflow with scrap. His half of their old mattress spills off of the platform they built a few seasons ago. Blue light bathes the space and leaks through the places where the salvaged partitions won’t fit together. 

Tonight in his video screen aquarium, Troy’s fed firefish to Aquatoran bubble coral, their pretend bodies dissolving in equally pretend mucus nets. Tyreen gives them a look, then jumps onto the bed with him.

“So,” she whispers, cracking her knuckles.

“You don’t have to whisper,” says Troy. 

“I found something that says I do.”

“Like anybody tells you anything.” He smiles, showing his crowded, messy teeth. 

She shrugs, and while she’s at it, tugs down his ratty pajama pants to get a look at his wound— a massive, purple bruise on his thigh. 

No part of him has grown in quite right and he has a hole in place of a right arm. His latest injury soured on his fragile skin and needed drained. Tyreen did it for him and he only grabbed her hair once, didn’t make a sound besides a couple staggered coughs. After, when they’d explained Troy was going to be stuck in his room for a few days, Dad said, “Slugabed,” and stalked off. Troy smiled then too. At least the man had admitted he was around for once. 

Anyway, the bruise is still livid, but the incisions have started healing.

Tyreen trades him for the look, pulling up her slip so he can see the paper she’s still got hidden on her hip.

Troy’s eyes glint. “Oh, what is  _ that _ ?”

“It’s a map. Seriously,” Tyreen says. She unfolds it between their laps.

He hesitantly takes one edge, holding his breath as he runs the paper through his fingers— the stuff’s as unfamiliar to him as it is to her. He studies too, the way he does the really good finds in the ruins. He’s careful not to touch the ink. “So, that’s where the blue mantakores live. She even drew that hollow where they like to nest. It’s not to scale, but…”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Of course it does. Girls navigate by landmarks.” Troy says that as a fact, and moves on, “Mama says there’s a way to cross someplace Northeast of that.”

“I mean, we knew it probably didn’t go on forever.”

“ _ Probably _ , or forever’s a lot smaller than we thought. Anyway, after that, there’s…”

“There’s more.” Tyreen lets the tension in her back drop off. She lies with her head against his empty shoulder. 

“We knew that too.”

“It’s someplace she got to while she was pregnant with us.” Tyreen gestures to the left-hand caption. 

“You think?” Troy tips his head to her, resting his cheek on her hair. 

“I think we should go back.”

“I’ll try not to walk into any knocked over marrow bones this time.” There’s a lightness in his voice despite the fact running headlong into a storm-crushed bone happens to be what caused his injury.

It’s the season for thunder and pelting rain on Nekrotafeyo. After that the rivers and ponds will bloom and the ruins wash clean. 

They always do, at least for as much of always as Tyreen knows. “Maybe there aren’t any bones up there.” It’s the strangest thing she’s thought all night. She wants to taste knowing the answer the same way she wants to breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 11/26/2020


	3. Chapter 3

They spend the storming weeks packing, a little of this and a little more of that hidden away. Tyreen tells Dad that she’s making six new bolts, but instead she makes eight and stashes the two best ones in Troy’s part bins. Troy hides a needle in the seam of his jeans and polishes manta bones to hooks and barbs much nicer than the ones they’d get if they helped themselves to one of the punched metal sheets of “survival tools” kept in reverence beside the lamps in the common room drawers. They dry and beat an extra yard of air algae to patch up one of the old tents— none are in great shape, but repairs just mean more to pieces to palm and they are very good at palming things. Dad taught them that much.

There’s no need to take a striker. Tyreen wears Mama’s every day. The ceramic filters for their water skins they’re obliged to steal. Troy sighs about it, but afterwards they sit by the stove and sharpen their knives while Dad looks on, almost smiling as he talks about dancing on Athenas, what a ritual it was. The two of them have their own ritual to themselves, polishing with the fine, muddy grit that leaves their blades shimmering.

That makes everything done once Tyreen raids the storeroom. She does that by herself around midnight, then sleeps surrounded by dried fruit and rye flour and one sad pack of sugar syrup. 

In the morning, she gets up first. She packs everything, her equipment and her brother’s. He ducks out of his room, sees her holding his things, and slips back to his own space. When he comes back geared up like she wants him, he groans. He takes his things from her though.

They go down to breakfast like that. Breakfast is preserved Djira fat and plums on dandelion leaves. They’ve cultivated anything and everything they could from the ship that wrecked their parents here, but everything wasn’t much and it still gets cooked over a fire outside so it doesn’t stink up the indoors of the homestead.

Dad laughs when he sees them. It’s supposed to be laundry day, after all. “Now, what are you doing with all of that dug out of storage? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were turning into a magpie and not a young lady.” As he says that, he nonetheless dishes a plate for Troy, sliding it his way and watching crossly as he takes his first bite.

Troy twists his dandelion leaves around his fork for too long, but he eats. 

“We’re going hunting,” says Tyreen.

“Now excuse you, Starlight. Those are  _ camping _ supplies. And who told me anything bigger than a regular bow’s not fair to the mantas?” He points to the crossbow kit lashed to the side of her pack.

“It’s the best time of year. Maybe we’ll stay out a while and get something new to eat.”

“There isn’t anything out there you can’t have twice as much of staying right here. Don’t be so silly.” This time, when he laughs, it’s fake. Really painfully fake. 

Troy stares at her for half a second, then hunches down towards his plate. 

“Mom disagrees,” Tyreen reaches into her shirt pocket. She pulls on the map until a corner shows, one with Mama’s pen marks almost to the edge. “You really gonna try to stop us? We’ll swing back around when we get cold. Just. Whatever. Go watch more crappy old movies.”

Dad keeps laughing as she shoves the paper away. His hand goes out to her. It’s only at the last he remembers that he can’t take it from her if it’s that close to her skin. He pulls away. His face twists. But he swallows and he sighs and he finally tastes his own breakfast. “Come back in two pieces.”

“We’re gonna,” Troy pipes up. “And we’re not gonna be gone that long. We promise, right?”

Tyreen shrugs.

Dad looks between the two of them. He almost makes eye contact with his son. Then he nods and that’s the end of it.

He doesn’t even go to see them off, not that Tyreen gives him much of a chance. She grabs Troy as soon as he’s done with his water and drags him with her, shouting, “Bye, Dad!” over her shoulder. The guy’s got Sparrow to deal with the plates. 

Morning skims across the crags and marrow bones. The statues at the entrance to the homestead cast shadows that look like skyscrapers across their path. But no, it’s still just the two of them marching down into the creek valleys. There’s not even a dash of a cloud, scuffle of an animal.

Tyreen thinks she had better be right about the end of storm season turning the valley fat and flush. She’s starving. She scents the mist rising from below, licking her lips. So it’s not like she means to pause, but she does. 

Troy crosses the three steps he usually keeps behind her. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder a few inches from a charmingly perilous drop. 

“That wasn’t very nice, Ty,” he says.

“Wasn’t very nice he burned Mama’s stuff,” Tyreen says back.

“He was upset.” The sharpness there’s not even a flash of what used to be when Troy talked about the fire before. “I know I fainted and I didn’t see.”

“Yeah, well. You were a wreck that whole year.”

Tyreen  _ had  _ watched. Taking Mama’s striker out of the sand that was left of her skin hadn’t stopped Dad from trying to wipe Mama away. Tyreen had cried until her face hurt, saw Dad use one of the last of the fireplace matches to light Mama’s pillow and let it rain hot ash into the rest— her chair and the perfume bottle where she’d kept threads from the twin’s umbilical cords; her papers and her favorite books. Trinkets from the ruins she called her own. 

At least he’d had the sense not to burn all of her clothes. Tyreen is wearing one of her shirts. 

“There was that thing with my heart,” Troy mentions.

“But you’re fine now.”

“Ah. Yeah.” He taps his boot in one of his own footprints from another day. He sniffs, just like she did. “Smells nice out.”

“It really does. If you had my nose, Bro.”

Troy snorts. He waits for her to start off. Three of her steps and he follows. His own shadow looks bigger verses hers than it did the last time they went out.

Tyreen doesn’t wonder about that. It was going to happen sooner or later. Must be later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 11/26/2020


	4. Chapter 4

The valley thrums, wet with fresh rot and old existences streaming back to life. New lucernae have budded in the air coral colonies. The creek runs cool, thick with spores and bug spawn. The water looks bodily and not in a pleasant way, but when Tyreen closes her eyes, her hunger turns it to sparks of every color. Her Leech beckons her to wade in and take all the newness for herself right then. 

But if all those bugs grow up, she can eat them later, whole and experienced and longing. They will taste so much better. So Dad has always insisted, but Dad has never eaten the way Tyreen does. He doesn’t know the sweet buzz that very fresh life gives her. 

Further down into the shady places of the valley, smears of slime mold bubble blue and glassy on the marrow bones; though another one of those ‘trees’ Tyreen and Troy had liked to play under has blown over, its bone splitting. Air coral threads already slick the inside. They pause and they say nothing, her and her brother. He snaps off a few inside shards of the bone and licks the new growth off, staining his tongue.

It annoys Tyreen that the thing died without her. It annoys her more that they’ve met nothing for her to have for breakfast when Troy’s already eaten two breakfasts himself. 

Then they spy something in the distance; something unmoving, but it still shows a light in her reach. Tyreen runs towards it. Troy sighs and follows. 

What Tyreen’s found, she doesn’t know. It could be any number of native arthropods, something Mama would have called a bug to Dad, but it’s been beaten badly by a storm surge current. Some of it’s luminescence still works though it’s skin, even in the sunlight and her open eyes. Tyreen slams her marked hand down on it and before it can rear at her, that other part of her being spills out, plucking up all of the life and bringing it into her own body where it rests in her veins and her belly. It tastes salty and tender. 

She bends over the shining remains of the corpse and her spit dribbles leave pits in the delicate sand sculpture surface. 

The other way over the valley, there are whole banks of the sand against the bone earth marking where she’s gone to find her supper.

“Good?” Troy asks. He simpers at her even though he has to know. 

He’s also being a jerk, but Tyreen doesn’t mind feeding him too. She takes him by the wrist and smacks him against her wet chin, holding him there and watching their sparks fill the left side of her vision.

“Eww,” he says, but he doesn’t pull away. He has to eat both ways, after all — theirs and the silly human one Tyreen’s body sometimes tries insisting on with the whole slobber thing.

She gets him nice and full so that they can keep going, maybe until sunset. That’s what she has in mind, not that she’s told him as much.

She doesn’t tell him much of anything when they’re out. She could talk all she wants, and she doubts he’d complain, but moving into the wilderness, just the two of them? There’s no need. Tyreen does have an appreciation for  _ that _ , for the functional silence that lets the ecologic noises sway through their awareness. 

It’s more comforting than the sounds of home have been for a long while. She would like to listen. Troy can talk later in his sleep if one of them has to say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 11/26/2020


	5. Chapter 5

They walk until Troy starts panting a while after sunset. The place Tyreen flops down signalling that they’re done is past the dell where they usually stop for the night if they’re out hunting for anything  _ serious _ .

Nightfall on Nekrotafeyo isn’t all that dark. Reflective gobs of the crust swim in low orbit. Most of the wildlife glows. Mama used to speculate that the glut of bioluminescence evolved due to unusual pressures. Communication via sound was fine on other worlds, but here? Either the Eridians were too loud or the planet used to sing before it broke. Something fanciful like that. 

Tyreen and Troy would have to do a whole society’s digging if they wanted to even halfway know. 

But it is just the two of them, so they go hunting instead and they accept that they glow too. They must belong here. At least a little bit. 

Part of Tyreen still wishes she could walk until the place where she was born turned to a pinprick of nothingness behind her. Even if it took a million years. Even if her feet bled until they were, somehow, impossibly, nothing but bones.

For now, she and her brother have a preference for travelling during the day that they’ve learned from books about other planets entirely. She thinks it might even be easier to travel by night if they put their minds to it. Either way, Troy will only last so long and it’s just about as far as Tyreen realizes she’s grown bored listening to her own footfalls.

Troy sets a trap for his supper. She pitches their tent and spreads his bedroll with one corner turned down like Dad insists is fancy and right. Troy probably doesn’t care beyond having a laugh about it when he sees later. They gather deadfall for a fire. He goes for a piss while she lights the tinder with her sparker. Something takes flight from the fungal scrub, fearing the strange, orange glimmer.

Dad might be able to see the smoke if he looks out. The night’s that clear. Tyreen doesn’t figure he’ll bother. She doesn’t much care either way. Actually, it’d be kind of weird if he did look, did mind, did care that much. Besides, he probably got into the plum brandy and fell asleep. Probably forgot dinner unless one of the robots reminded him.

Troy tries to sneak up behind her. He knows very well she can taste him on the back of her senses and that there’s nothing like him anyplace she’s ever been. He taps something cool and glass against her cheek— a flask of plum brandy. 

“Well, well, well,” says Tyreen. She reaches up to take it. She gets it too, since there’s a familiar thwack of a trap turning over and hexlings shrieking. Troy drops his guard and licks his lips and runs off to claim supper. Of course it’s hexlings— little worm birds with no sense at all that poop when they startle each other. Also, the easiest thing to catch this close to the homestead. 

Troy tosses her the skinny, meek ones that are only mostly still kind of alive. Life is life and they wouldn’t fill him, but she gets plenty enough and sand all over her lap when she can’t quite resist the very old, mangy one in particular. It tastes so nutty. She has an urge to lick her fingers once it’s gone, but she knows she’ll cut her tongue on the glass her Leech makes. Anyway, now that she’s somewhat sated for the time being, Troy tempts her with one of the cooking knives. She shrugs, and tempts him back with a wax cup of the brandy.

They toast and they drink. Tyreen blushes as she settles in to cook. Since that is what she’s doing

She can touch dead things. Of course she can. And this hexling is still warm as she pulls apart the segments on its belly. “In or out of the bones?”

“You mind me crunching?”

Tyreen considers, then pokes him in the belly with the hilt of the cooking knife. “You’re so skinny. You should eat more. Tasty, tasty animal fat. Yummmmy!”

Troy snorts like he’s amused, but he turns to his own brandy for a moment even though his own hands are bloody as he drinks. His next blink lasts just a little too long. “A-and breakfast,” he says. “It’ll keep for breakfast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 11/27/2020


	6. Chapter 6

Tyreen wakes up before dawn. She’s ended up in Troy’s bedroll again. They have this thing where there can be a whole other body between them and sometimes sleep drags them back together like they grew in their mother’s belly. 

She reaches into his pants pockets for the flask. Troy, very much awake, pushes her hand away and smiles. “For when we find something really great. I just thought it’d be nice, you know?”

She shrugs.

Troy picks through preserved fruit and hard-cooked hexling meat. Tyreen eats a nearby spawn pool. She spends the rest of the morning grinning through the fizz it leaves on her vague memory of what it used to be like when her mouth did ordinary mouth things besides talking and drooling.

(She was four when she stopped being able to eat with it? Fourish? She realized something had happened inside of her before anybody else did. She knows that.)

They go to put on their shoes last of all their gear. They end up staring at each other, quirking eyebrows. Tyreen knots both pairs of laces together and throws them over the width of her pack. She dances out onto the dew-damp stones and stretches in the morning, moss dying under her toes.

This way is a little less familiar, if only because they haven’t come so far since the rains penned them closer to the homestead. The low, flat space beyond thrills with pockets of cool mist and rushing life. In the sunlight it glistens and the ruins in the hills long overgrown with air coral gleam, a jewel or a wound.

The two of them pause at the usual path to one of the temples they know. It’s still fairly clear. Some of the banks of stones have shifted. They could go for an hour or two, see if they can still find the places where they wrote their names not all that long after they’d learned. 

“I wanna keep going,” Tyreen says, scruffing her feet.

“OK. Maybe on the way back,” Troy agrees. He marches on, a handful of steps more the way they’re headed, only slowing when she doesn’t follow right away.

All at once, she dashes in front of him, flicking her tongue his way.

He chases her.

And she chases him back.

And they must scare half the prey in the valley out of their sights, circling each other and laughing.

“So, you know,” Troy says, not like he’s telling her something, but he wants an answer out of her. Kind of an annoying thing he does. “We’re gonna get to name stuff, right?”

“ _ Get _ to?” Tyreen laughs again. She outright runs from him, skimming almost to a stop just to say, “Bro, that’s like… That stuff’s always been ours. We should have some fun with it. C’mon.”

“You don’t think it’s a little scary? Putting ourselves… Doing that?”

“Not really.”

“But we don’t know how Mama did it.” To that, he skims in closer to her, dipping his head down like he’s trying to take stock of something a lot less sapient than Tyreen happens to be.

Tyreen ducks back, but she shows her teeth when she does it. She wants to growl, but she also doesn’t know quite what stops her. “Doubt Mama did either. We’ll make it work. I mean?” She shrugs, then hitches her bag into place. “We don’t know where we’re going either. But who cares? This is  _ all _ ours.”

“I dunno,” Troy says, shuffling after her. Somehow, he’s got moss spores up to his ankles where only her soles and her calluses are the least bit dirty. It’s enough even that it makes him smell different. Like he’s been out here a long, long time before she found him. “Funny way to think about it.”

“Really?”

“Not like we took it or anything. It seems like we should take it.”

“Fine. We’re taking it now.”

Tyreen scampers up ahead. She finds a likely looking patch of moss and roots in it until she smells different to, only for her, it’s of sand and ashes and that’s another stream of death she leaves behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 11/27/2020


End file.
